20 
LAND 6? WATER 
November 21, 1918 
I Recent Novels 
SIK H. KIDER HAGGARD is one of the few novelists 
of whom we are content to ask only that he should 
do it again, and that he should keep on doing it. 
This means more in his case than in most. There 
are few periods of history which he has not touched, 
and none that he has touched which he has not adorned- — at 
le^st, with a few unhistorical characters. However, in 
Moon of Israel (Murray, 7s. net) the unhistorical characters 
are fewer than usual. The Pharoah Mcneptah existed, and 
his son Seti and also the usurper Amenmeses, whose unen- 
viable distinction in this book as the Pharaoh of the Exodus 
is approved by so good an authority as the late Sir Gaston 
Maspero. Even the faithful scribe. Ana, who follows Seti 
in greatness and disgrace, is an authentic character. Add to 
these Merapi, the beautiful Israelite who leaves heV own 
people for love of Seti, Ki, the great and malevolent magician, 
and Bakenkhonsu, a humorous and loyal old sage — add, 
further, much heroism, several deaths, several miracles, a 
good deal of unalleviated villainy, and Pharaoh overwhelmed 
in the Red Sea — and you have a characteristic story of the 
old-fashioned kind which no one to-day can write so well as 
Sir Rider Haggard. To be sure, he does not here repeat 
the magic of King Solomon's Mines or She or the Zulu tales. 
But he equals his Cleopatra, which was a very good book 
indeed. He skimps n/either nobility nor wickedness nor 
desperate deeds ; and he lays on the marvels with a lavish 
hand. He has, in fact, done it again ; and we ought all to 
be duly grateful. 
Mr. Alexander Macfarlan, the author of Mockery (Heine- 
mann, 6s. net) is anything but an old-fashioned writer. In 
this, his first novel, he sets out minutely — one might say, 
surgically — to examine the soul of Deadly-Earnest Grant, 
a rather loathsome young man, whose life is built up on mean 
pride and mean deceptions. I confess that books in which 
the principal characters have obviously incurred the bitter 
dislike of the author, bore me rather severely ; and I do not 
find either Grant's, adventures or his psychology easily 
credible. He begins life as an anti-Papist lecturer, tells a 
story in his lecture that is exposed as a scandalous falsehood, 
and, resigning his job, sets out for New Zealand in the com- 
pany of a somewhat heartless doctor who is curious to see 
what will become of him when he lands in a strange country 
with no money. On the boat he poses as a wealthy man, 
and falls in with a young woman who is maintaining the 
same pose with equal falsity. Each decides to marry the 
other as a means to fortune ; and their reptilian amours are 
watched over by Mr. Govan, a leader of prayer-meetings, 
who, in the competition among the characters of this book 
to be the most disgusting, leads the field by a short head. 
Grant, however, has the misfortuneito fall genuinely in lovie 
with a beautiful girl in the steerage ; and, while he is in some 
perturbation over a sudden glimmer of sincerity which can 
hardly have surprised him more than it surprises the reader, 
the ship is wrecked. 'All'^he persons mentioned, with the 
exception of the doctor, are saved on a desert island, and 
they only. Here Grant gets near enough to the truth to tell 
his supposed heiress that he is suffering from cancer and 
that, as he cannot reach civilisation in time to be cured, 
their engagement must be regarded as cancelled. He cannot, 
however, bring himself to own that he does not wish to 
marry her. But Mr. Govan, who is an electrical engineer,, 
proceeds to rig up a wireless telegraph in order that he may 
summon timely help and preserve the happiness of "his 
young people." While Grant is meditating murder, his false 
heiress, deciding justly enough that, money or no money, 
she cannot stand Grant and would prefer his cancer to pro- 
ceed, appears and hits Govan over the head with a crowbar 
— the one incident of the story that causes my heart to beat 
for a moment in sympathy. - » 
As a relief, I turn to Lord Frederick Hamilton's The 
Assembly (Hurst & Blackett, 6s. gd. net) with its simple 
heroisms and its simple jokes. It is not very well put together, 
and the sentiment is sometimes rather strong ; I much prefer 
the author's spy stories. But it is unaffected and readable ; 
and the descriptions of ranching in the Argentine and of 
country pursuits in Norfolk are really good. 
The Dardanelles 
If any episode in the war is yet so far closed and over as 
to be properly a matter of history, it is, I suppose, that of 
the Dardanelles Expedition ; and it is therefore an excellent 
thing that Mr. H. W. Nevinson should have undertaken to 
write an account of it. He is, in addition to the advantage 
of having been on the spot, a writer of ability and judicial 
temper; and his book The Dardanelles Campaign (Nisbet, 
i8s. net) has in consequence much more of the air of being 
a real book than most of the ephemeral productions of the 
war. It is a fact, which will presently be realised by both 
writers and readers, that modern warfare does not lend 
itself to detailed narrative. Mr. Nevinson overcomes the 
difficulty by giving his detail set in a firm framework of the 
political and strategical conceptions of the campaign, so that 
the minor incidents are never allowed to overcrowd the 
main view. As a result, he gives an extremely clear and 
vivid picture of the whole, from the deliberations of the 
War Council in London — so far as they are known— to that 
astounding moment on August 9th, when Major Allanson 
and his men reached the s(iddle between Chunuk Bair and 
Hill Q and saw the Dardanelles, and were driven back by 
shells believed to be from our own ships. Perhaps this 
tragic accident lost us the campaign — perhaps not. Mr. 
Nevinson believes that its conception was the most promising 
which had appeared in the war up to the moment of his 
writing ; but he believes that its success was endangered by 
the premature naval operations, almost lost by mistakes in 
the military operations, and finally ruined by want of proper 
support from home. The last word has not yet been said, 
and it is a long time before we shall hear it. But Mr. 
Nevinson 's book must be regarded as the first step in the 
long process of judgment by history ; for he writes not 
with the haste and superficiality of the war correspondent, 
but with the care and seriousness of the historian. 
Jones's Wedding 
Arthur Hugh Sidgwick-was a brilliant man who reserved 
his serious talents for the Board of Education and gave the 
humorous surplus to the public in two little volumes, Walking 
Essays and The Promenade Ticket. The public is not ever 
Hkely to know what a loss to the Civil Service was caused 
when he died of wounds in France in September, 1917 ; but 
those who chuckled uncontrollably over The Promenade 
Ticket know that they have lost an anticipated pleasure. 
A small volume of his verses, Jones's Wedding and Other 
Poems (Arnold, 3s. 6d. net) has now appeared. These pieces 
are not as good as his best work ; and some of them are 
rather early. But the title-piece, a long dissertation in com- 
mon-sense philosophy on marriage is admirably gay and 
admirably sensible. It is a sort of English Anatol, a tale 
of Jones's episodes — all perfectly respectable— before his 
fate closes on him ; and it contains so much wisdom mixed 
with so much humour that one hardly knows from which 
side to take it. But Sidgwick's humour in nearly all .these 
pieces is directed from a distinct point of view. In one he 
ridicules the commentators on Shakespeare, in another he 
neatly puts Mr. Shaw where he ought to be. In a third, he 
contrasts the Early Victorian woman who married an ordinary 
man with the advanced woman who 
Was wooed and won and sometimes kissed 
By a sage, short-sighted Positivist. 
and joined with him in working for the public good, and 
Riddled with ruthlessly strict analysis, 
Sentiments, creeds and similar fallacies ; 
And finally proved (by a syllogism) 
That the Family was evolved or grown 
From basic, primitive Egoism 
(They had no family of their own). 
Sidgwick, you can see, had a definite philosophy of his own ; 
and in his scheme of things he exalted the Early Victorian 
woman who "without an atom of proper shame gave her 
eldest son a Biblical name" much over the clever woman. 
You may not altogether like his point of view ; but you can 
find it at its gayest and most forcible in these verses! 
Peter Bell. 
